The hush by Sara Foster

This riveting and brilliant novel opens to a woman removing her watch, a tool used by the Government to monitor people’s whereabouts, leaving it behind when she goes out.  Actually she places it on the paw of her dog, so that ‘they’, the English Government) do not know that she is doing the incorrect thing and going out without being able to be ‘traced’ via their watch, a mandatory item worn by all adults.  The watches now carry not only the ID of the owner, but as well, they carry their health data, credit payments and their whereabouts.  Lainey, the major character, is fearful, but is most determined to do what she considers that she must do. Before she leaves her house, she feeds the starlings in her garden, whose mother has disappeared, and we understand Lainey as a person who cares about the birds, about nature, and about the world in which she lives.  Like most others in England, Lainey is leading an oppressed life, and her mother, Emma, hears her checking her health with a mouth swab, so she can go to work in the hospital, a fear-filled place during this time when ‘virus issues’ dominate, and everyone in the UK feels unsettled.

 

After the years spent living with the ‘virus’, many people are coping, but many find it extremely challenging and difficult.  The people of the UK are tired and unsettled by the unexpected disappearance of so many young women.  Work is hard, and everyone fears the virus and life has become ‘like a minefield’, Foster writes.  Like her friend, Cathy, she is also disturbed by her workplace, as a worker there, she is privy to the  hospital’s responses and rules, with so many births going wrong in the UK, particularly with babies that are born ‘alive’, but who die almost immediately after birth - the count approximately 1 in 10 babies dying soon or immediately after birth.  As we read, we discover that this initial death rate has increased dramatically to 1 in 5 deaths.  Having taken a pharmacy pregnancy test, which was positive, a friend of Lainey has disappeared, and this common occurrence has been noted publicly in a new popular song - calling on everyone to start thinking about the issues that are occurring without the public’s knowledge.  Protests across the UK have been about all of the issues of concern, about global warming, in a world fearful of the conditions that are occurring, with climate change affecting so many people, and, of great concern, authoritarian governments removing people’s normal ‘rights’.  

 

Lainey’s grandmother, Geraldine, has recently published a book about the terrible events that are making people’s lives so uncomfortable and challenging, claiming that all the people of the world need to accept the problems with the world and work together to save this special and beautiful planet. Lainey is shocked at first that her grandmother could consider and construct such a protest, and then becomes mesmerised by her grandmother’s intelligent understanding of the world and of her despair about the politicians who care, she claims, only about 'lining their pockets.'  Sara Foster offers hope towards the end of the novel, hope that other people like her characters are caring about the way in which the world is becoming an unsafe place, and that so many people actually do want to support and care for others.  

 

This book is about climate change, about how the world is addressing issues of concern, and would be suitable for students in Years 11 and 12, as the issues raised, the fear and unsettled feelings all evoke some of the experiences of the Covid world that has unsettled, and indeed changed, the world, and the lives of so many people.